A song for Burns’s Night
January 25, 2025
Andrew Curry writes: It’s Burns Night tonight when Scots worldwide, and others, celebrate the birthday of Scotland’s greatest poet, who will turn 265 today. And this gives Salut! Live the chance to celebrate the singer and songwriter Dougie MacLean, who compiled a selection of the many Robert Burns’ songs that he’s recorded through his career a few years ago.
MacLean is best known as the composer of the much-covered Caledonia, which will be an obvious candidate for Scotland’s national anthem when the country regains its independence.
His song The Gael—used as the theme to The Last of the Mohicans—has probably been heard by millions of people without them realising that he had written it.
MacLean turned 70 last year, but he’s still playing and performing. In fact he’s one of the most accessible folk performers in the world, because almost every week he does a live online concert, mostly from the studio in his home in The Old Schoolhouse in Perthshire.
He started doing these performances during lockdown, and just carried on afterwards, His wife Jean makes sure that the technology works. He's recently passed the #250 mark.
Most of these are free and posted on his YouTube channel, although every so often, on special occasions they are ticketed. (His Burns Night concert tonight, for example, is a ticketed event.)
The timing of the concert, at 9 o'clock in the evening, means that he attracts listeners from America and Australia, at least judging from the comments on YouTube.
But we're here to talk about Robert Burns, and I coud pick here any one of the songs on Dougie MacLean's Burns record. I'm fond, for example, of Ca' The Yowes (Call The Ewes) which fits well with the idea of Burns as a "ploughman poet".
But since Burns is also a radical poet, infused by the emerging democratic ideas of the eighteenth century, and since this is also the week in which Donald Trump has returned as the President of the United States, I'm going to pick one of his radical songs:
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
It’s comin yet for a’ that,
That Man to Man the warld o’er
Shall brithers be for a’ that.
And a glass to toast Robert Burns today, with whatever liquid you prefer.
Read more: Dave Swarbrick's Burns's recordings
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